HERE

A new collaboration between digital map-makers, the OneMap Alliance, has set itself the challenge of developing a global HD map for autonomous cars by 2020. The project - which is also inviting other companies to get involved - hopes to offer automakers and other companies developing driverless vehicles a single, consistent HD map across different regions.

If Hyperloop is to succeed as a transportation option, it needs to be more than just a fast train carriage in a tube: it needs to fit seamlessly into an overall travel ecosystem. That's just what Virgin Hyperloop One is aiming to show off at CES 2018 today, bringing along not only its first-generation pod but showcasing an app that it says could preview how the high-speed transportation might fit in with other transit options.

Bosch is buying a stake in HERE, snapping up a 5-percent cut of the digital mapping company building high-definition cartography for tomorrow's autonomous vehicles. HERE began life as Navteq, before being acquired by Nokia, rebranded, and then subsequently sold in late-2015 to a consortium of German automakers, Audi, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz owner Daimler AG.

HERE, the navigation company that is remaking itself as the potential heart of autonomous driving, has launched a crowdsourced road safety service, with BMW first to sign up. The HERE Safety Services Suite promises to beam real-time information on road conditions, potential hazards, and changing speed limits to the dashboard of new BMW cars from mid-2018, calling on data from a growing fleet of vehicles spanning multiple automakers.

No, LG isn’t making autonomous vehicles. It isn’t even making its own in-vehicle unit itself. Instead, it is hooking up with HERE, formerly owned by Nokia, to provide car and head unit makers with a new telematics platform that will leverage the two companies’ key strengths in order to give self-driving cars a better picture of the world around them. Basically, it’s a partnership that bundles HERE’s navigation technology and LG’s communication expertise for the cars of the future.

Autonomous driving is coming, and unsurprisingly Intel believes it should be at the heart of it. At the former Altera facility in San Jose, California, the company better known for powering your laptop and PC outlined its vision for driverless cars over the coming years. While collaboration is the name of Intel's game, make no mistake: it sees this as a prime opportunity to sell more silicon.

Intel has announced plans to acquire a 15-percent ownership stake in HERE, the navigation company. HERE provides a navigation app not unlike Google Maps, and its data is used for relevant technology, including IoT services and automotive applications. This transaction, says Intel, is expected to close in the first quarter of this year, after which point Intel’s nominee will be added to the company’s Supervisory Board of Directors.

Mapping company HERE and car camera company Mobileye are teaming up on self-healing maps for autonomous vehicles, potentially turning traffic into roving cartographers. The deal will see HERE, which is developing HD Live Maps with higher levels of detail for self-driving cars to follow, use Mobileye's data to maintain its accuracy as roadways evolve. However, it will also offer a new way for autonomous systems to localize themselves, potentially more accurately - and working alongside - existing methods like GPS.

The most recent models of cars these days are equipped with all kinds of sensors, and yet traffic services still mostly rely on just one source of data: GPS probe data. HERE, the map making service formerly owned by Nokia and now owned by a consortium of three German car makers, is aiming to change that with four new services of its own. Falling under the collective HERE Open Location Platform, the services will pool data gathered from the sensors of different cars. And these cars won’t even have to come from the same brand.

This week the folks at HERE Maps have changed the name of their most prominent app, HERE Maps, into HERE WeGo. This new app is centered on "working out the best way to get to where [people] want to go." This is for people who want to navigate their own city as much as it is for people that are visiting a city they've never been to before. With HERE WeGo, users are invited to type in their destination and are very quickly delivered a variety of routes and means of travel.

Car sharing and autonomous vehicles are widely expected to cut road congestion, but the future for drivers may not be so clear cut, according to two new studies released this week. The impact of alternatives to individual car ownership is still fairly uncertain, particularly as the long-term market viability of self-driving vehicles remains mired in legal, ethical, and technological questions, with the potential for traffic jams to initially get worse, not better.

Mapping company HERE is driving ahead with its scheme to design the common language for all autonomous vehicles, submitting its Esperanto-for-autos to a vehicle safety standards body. Now dubbed SENSORIS, the car-to-cloud system was announced twelve months ago as an open specification for vehicle sensor data to be collected and transmitted to the cloud by connected vehicles.